Plenty of life at the euthanasia committee. One of the paradoxes of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is that it makes everyone’s blood pump faster.
You go expecting a funeral dirge only to find they’re all jumping up and down making furious interventions, eyes glinting. It’s more like the last scene in Hamlet than a sad, hushed, end-of-life hospital ward.
Yesterday saw the Bill’s last committee stages, that part of the legislative process when a small group of MPs chews over details of a proposed law. The meeting was held in a stuffy, oblong room whose flock wallpaper could have made visitors feel they were inside a large coffin.
MPs sat at desks using laptops. Kim Leadbeater (Lab, Spen Valley), the weirdly chirrupy proposer of this backbench bill – she is any nightmare’s notion of a Butlin’s Redcoat – was sitting at such a machine.
The computer’s glow lent her face a ghostly tinge. Turned her golden tresses green.
Danny Kruger (Con, E Wilts) said that if the Government funded a ‘national suicide service’ it would alter the principles of the NHS. ‘It would take a red pen to Bevan’s legacy.’
Another strange aspect of this bill is that Mr Kruger, its leading pro-life opponent, is the one with the undertaker’s manner. Wind whistles round his sibilants. He is unerringly polite.
Ms Leadbeater gave him her most simpering smile but one sensed she was, behind that, fuming. Would willingly have throttled posh Danny, with or without his permission.
Labour MP Kim Leadbeater is pictured above in her office in the Houses of Parliament, London
File image of MP Danny Kruger speaking in opposition to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, in the chamber of the House of Commons in Westminster, London, on November 29, 2024
Should assisted dying be limited to NHS wards or should private hospitals be able to offer this ‘service’, as it is already being called? Simon Opher (Lab, Stroud) said the distinction was ‘spurious’ because private care was already widespread in our state healthcare.
Sarah Olney (Lib Dem, Richmond Park) feared the creation of ‘a market for end of life services’ which could become ‘a serious ethical minefield’.
Dr Opher, again: ‘Spurious.’ Ms Olney and Mr Kruger nibbled further at the danger of private clinics being ‘incentivised’ to bump off patients. Dr Opher: ‘A completely spurious idea.’ Oh, for Heaven’s sake, someone fetch that man a new adjective.
Terminal mumbler Daniel Francis (Lab, Bexleyheath & Crayford) said something about, I think, death doctors parading their wares at trade fairs. Mr Kruger, likewise: ‘We’re setting up incentives that will corrupt doctors.’
This drew gasps, tuts, and shaking of the head from young Jake Richards (Lab, Rother Valley), appalled by the idea any medic could be anything but saintly. He’s obviously never spent a night drinking with trainee surgeons. I once did that in Dublin and the next day I could have done with a liver transplant.
Mr Kruger stuck to his last, challenging ‘the automatic assumption of innate goodness of doctors’. He mentioned, by way of evidence, the rackets in cosmetic surgery.
Ms Leadbeater scoffed at the thought of anyone making loot out of assisted dying. She should read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One to see just how tacky the death industry can become.
Naz Shah (Lab, Bradford W) chilled the blood further by suggesting that big contracting firms such as Capita, Serco and G4S could go into the assisted-dying business. Aiee.
Kim Leadbeater (pictured) is at the centre of another row after being accused of misleading MPs over the depth of public support for her assisted dying legislation
Stock image: Man holding hand, giving support and comfort to woman, loved one sick in hospital bed
What a terrible thought. Imagine the corporate mission statement boasting ‘Death to Your Doorstep – When You Want It. Ring for a brochure today.’
Support for the bill came from Lewis Atkinson (Lab, Sunderland C), a former hospital manager. Trust me, I’m an NHS bureaucrat.
He bridled at Mr Kruger’s mention of Labour legend Aneurin Bevan and argued against the inequity of the status quo.
At present rich people can fly to Switzerland for an assisted death but the poor must suffer at home.
Maybe Bevan would have agreed with him. Or maybe he would have worried about vulnerable souls being bullied into swallowing some fiendish elixir.
From what I can remember from my night on the Guinness and Powers whiskey with those surgeons in Dublin, they were pretty persuasive at that.
